- Ḥalīm Barakāt (1936-, Syria) – Sittat Ayyām (1961, English trans. Six days, 1990). This novella reminisces of the events of 1948 (see 1948 al-Nakbah) in the fictional seaside town of Dayr al-Baḥr. Through the eyes of the hero, Suhayl, the reader follows a six-day lasting siege by Zionist forces, similar to the 1967 war which would occur almost 7 years after its publication. Sittat Ayyām also reflects on the social stagnation in the village, which is symbolized by the broken village clock (reference) (also in 1967 al-Naksah: Lebanon).
- Sayed Kashua (1975-, Israel / Palestine) – Aravim Rokdim (2002, English trans. Dancing Arabs, 2004). This novel, written in Hebrew by the Palestinian writer, tells the story of a young man from a rebellious family: his grandfather fought in 1948 against the Zionists and his father was arrested for a bomb attack in the name of freedom. However, when the nameless protagonist of the novel receives a scholarship for a Jewish boarding school his main ambition is to fit in with his peers, leading him to adopt their identity and neglect his own.
- Ibrāhīm Naṣrallah (1954-, Jordan / Palestine) – Zamān al-Khuyūl al-Bayḍāʾ (2007, English trans. Time of White Horses, 2012). In nearly 600 pages, Naṣrāllah describes life in the fictional Palestinian village of Hadiya through the story of three generations. By tracing the effects of Zionist colonialism from the 1880s to the present, it reflects on the colonial prehistory of the Nakbah under the Ottoman and British empire and the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 (reference). It was written within his broader project Palestinian Comedy, an eight-novel series in the spirit of Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine (also in L: Cultural and Literary Heritage: Philosophical heritage: French authors and philosophers and 1948 al-Nakbah).
Refrences:
In order of appearance
- Roger Allen. 1992. “The Mature Arabic Novel Outside Egypt.” In Modern Arabic Literature. eds. Muhammad Mustafa Badawi. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 193-223, p. 201
- Karim Mattar. 2014. “Out of time: colonial history in Ibrahim Nasrallah’s ‘Time of White Horses’.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 50(02): 176-188, p. 180